Quick refresher – last post, I wrote about how independent local news outlets (newspapers, mostly) are disappearing nationwide at an alarming rate. I gave you the data on that, but I also showed you who was stepping in to try and replace them: national and corporate-owned news outlets with agendas and Big Tech-funded “news organizations” with agendas of their own.
(*more proof about Big Tech’s intentions: I read in Wednesday’s API newsletter that The Google “News” Initiative is giving 11 countries - places like Uruguay, India, Mexico and Nigeria - $3 million to fund “fact checking” projects aimed at “debunking vaccine information.” They intend to communicate this info via community radio stations, “interactive radio dramas,” hip-hop music, “a grassroots network of rural women” and publicly placed “loudspeakers for offline audiences,” that apparently shout information all day to anyone walking past. Doesn’t matter if you like vaccines or not. Google forcing information on people via loudspeaker, 24-7, is LITERALLY straight out of the George Orwell book 1984…)
This week, I want to show you how, just as the news industry is weakening nationwide, our own Federal government is quietly pushing to exert increasing control over the industry. I previewed two ways in last week’s post:
a major expansion of our federally funded news media (NPR), AND
government “Covid relief” subsidies to massive news corporations.
But I also discovered a third way – a piece of proposed legislation called the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act of 2019, which was reintroduced in Congress last week after initially appearing in 2019. More about that in a minute.
I know it’s tough to get excited about any of this, but trust me when I say that nothing good ever comes of government intervention in news media.
Think about it. “The press” is supposed to be the “Fourth Estate” – 100% independent so journalists can report on ANY TOPIC to the American people without fear of punishment or repercussions (taxes, fines, legal challenges, harassment, etc.) from the government. Who will hold the government accountable if the news media becomes one with the government? Do you think the government will tell on itself?
Back to the task at hand - First up, let’s look at what’s happening over at NPR. I first learned about how fast it’s been growing from this article, on Poynter.org, titled: As other local news outlets struggle, NPR affiliates are growing – and quickly (*FYI - again, proving my point about Big Tech’s gradual foray into “news” - the Poynter Institute is a non-profit journalism organization that counts both Google and Facebook among its major donors…). Here’s a snapshot of the first few lines of the piece:
Just to compare with the facts and figures I shared last week – the Pew Research article I shared then showed that, “from 2008 to 2019, overall newsroom employment in the U.S. dropped by 23%.” By contrast, this Poynter article shows that, from 2011 to 2018 (I know they’re different timeframes, but it’s all we’ve got), numbers of journalists at NPR stations INCREASED by 50%.
Don’t get me wrong – NPR has some interesting content. And, in theory, I like the idea of using these small radio stations to generate local content that so many communities are desperately missing. But the fact remains, NPR is NOT an independent news organization. They are owned and operated by the United States government. State-run media.
The writer of the Poynter story above tells us how NPR is “building out a national collaborative network” and notes that “there was remarkable consistency” to each affiliate’s stories across multiple markets (ie: states). These things are presented as positives, but I see them more as negatives. Why? Both phrases imply conformity. And in the news industry, conformity is bad. The whole reason independent local news outlets are so valuable is because they do NOT conform. They are free to publish any kinds of stories they want to publish, their editors can think independently and their reporters can pursue unique story ideas as well. They do not have to “collaborate” with anyone, or be “consistent” with anyone else. News organizations that strive for nationwide “collaboration” and “consistency” usually end up churning out highly manipulated, sterile information… more like propaganda than journalism.
Add in the fact that NPR has now created a new “Station Investigations team,” which will be training reporters and guiding story content for all of NPR’s member stations nationwide AND which is headed up by a Washington Post alum… and we’ve got big trouble on the horizon. Why? The Washington Post is quite literally bad news. Many people who work there don’t practice journalism so much as activism. I don’t make such statements lightly; I’ve shown many times in this blog that the Post is a huge advocate for getting rid of “both sides” journalism (ie: they only want you to know one side of every story - theirs). But this week, we also learned that they are OK with making up “facts” to suit their narratives, when the Post very quietly admitted that its writers fabricated a quote by former President Trump in a story regarding the Georgia election results. Ouch. I wonder if the Post’s Margaret Sullivan will write about that Big Lie? (her favorite words, not mine).
(Interesting aside: the Post was able to get away with passing a fake quote off as real by attributing the false information to an anonymous source. Recall my piece: Anonymous Sources: A Sure Sign of Poor Reporting…)
What’s really interesting about all of this is that the federal government doesn’t seem to want to stop with just growing (and controlling) NPR … they seem to want to control regular media, too. The monopoly to end all monopolies.
The government isn’t openly trying to control these other news organizations content-wise (not yet, anyway), but what they ARE doing is working very hard to “help” struggling news corporations by giving them lots and lots of money... and special favors. The first time I learned about this was back in December, when I read this Reuters piece, titled: U.S. Congress agrees to expand payroll assistance to local news outlets.
At first glance, this seems like a good thing, since I have just spent one and a half posts now saying independent news outlets are dying at alarming rates. I should be glad the government is trying to help, right? Wrong. You know who Reuters says the government is really helping with this bailout? “Thousands of local newspapers, TV and radio stations [that] had been ineligible for the initial “Paycheck Protection Program” approved by Congress in March because they were owned by larger parent companies.”
Call me crazy, but why on earth does any organization – local news or otherwise - need to be bailed out by the government if it’s owned by a large parent company? Isn’t that the parent company’s problem? These are not mom and pop organizations, by the way – they’re major corporations.
And remember – newspapers aren’t failing because of Covid. Covid certainly didn’t help, but… newspapers have clearly been dying for decades, now, as the Pew statistics above show. In fact, when I interviewed a bunch of female news anchors for this story six years ago, one of them told me point blank that people working in news knew it was only a matter of time before all news content would be online. So – here’s another silly question… why, if they knew they needed to pivot to online, have they not been pivoting to online already? Why are they still spending so much money on print and TV news – news that increasing numbers of Americans are not consuming?
The other thing to consider is this: Yes, a lot of traditional / corporate media outlets are dying, and quickly (check out this thought-provoking piece by independent journalist Matt Taibbi about the dismal ratings at CNN, MSNBC and Fox both pre- and post-Trump). But the natural market is making up for it with independent news outlets (which – how interesting! - are starting to seriously compete with a lot of the established outlets). So the real problem here is not that news is dying, it’s that consumers are turning away from the big outlets. Instead of letting them die a natural death, like they probably should (and letting the new, independent news outlets take their places), the government is keeping them on life support via subsidies.
The money and favors don’t just stop with that one bailout, either. In this Nieman Reports article, we learn about how the latest Covid relief bill – the $1.9 trillion one that just passed the House last week – includes money (the amount is unspecified) to bail out local newspapers’ pension funds. OK – I’m willing to be the one in the room to ask questions… What happened to the pension funds in the first place? And why is it the government’s job to save media companies that cannot properly manage their own pension funds?
The boldest government intervention into the news media of all comes in the form of a bill that was drafted by both a democrat and republican in 2019, called the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act of 2019 (here’s a link to the actual bill). Basically, a team of normally competing major media companies (places like the NY Times, Washington Post, and NewsCorp, which owns Fox News and the Wall Street Journal) are asking to be exempt from Federal anti-trust laws so they can band together to negotiate for control over how Big Tech companies like Google and Facebook display their stories. Fair enough – if you’re a regular reader of this blog you know I’m not a huge fan of Big Tech. But, like so much legislation, this one could apparently have some pretty disturbing unintended consequences if it’s passed.
I’ve read three stories on this bill from three politically diverse sources I chose at random (Politico, The San Diego Times and Breitbart), from both 2019 and 2021, and the strange thing is, they all agree this bill is NOT a good idea. I’m not saying they’re right. I am saying they deserve thought. The Politico article in particular mentions what I have mentioned above – that newspapers have been in decline for decades and that it’s largely their own fault (that article also covers some really interesting theories about how the self-imposed loss of a classified business is really what caused newspapers’ financial declines).
What else I find strange is that the people who drafted this bill seem to assume that allowing people to use Facebook and Google to search for news stories is somehow unfair to the news outlets. I’m sure there’s some financial things happening there I don’t know, but I want to let you in on a little secret - in reality, Facebook and Google (and all other social media outlets, actually) provide a strange sort of free advertising for all digitally published stories. That is the ONLY reason I, as a journalist, am even on those social media platforms. How else could I blast out my stories to a huge audience of people, theoretically all over the world, without paying a PR firm a dime? The more people read my stories, the more my publications’ advertisers get clicks. The more clicks they get, they more they are likely to keep advertising with my publication. And the more money my publication has, the more likely it is to keep paying me to write for them. Voilà!
But the real and MAJOR problems with this legislation are perhaps best summed up in the following excerpt from the San Diego Times piece:
In short – a lot of people seem to think this bill is likely to have the “unintended” consequence of making only a select few big media corporations even more powerful while simultaneously minimizing news consumers’ access to other media outlets, including smaller, independent outlets. You know – the ones that are stealing consumers away from the select few big media outlets in the first place?
My big concern here is this – whenever someone gives special favors (like exemptions to Federal antitrust laws) and very large amounts of money (over and over and over again) to someone else, the recipient is pretty much beholden to the giver, right? Unless the giver is a true saint (and I think we can all pretty much agree the U.S. government is NOT run by saints), they will always want something in return for the money they gave to help out the recipient. One thing they definitely WOULDN’T want is for the person or organization they helped to write news stories that might make them look bad. This, in short, is how we end up with a media that won’t hold the government accountable for what it does.
A lot of people think it’s crazy to even imagine our government or news becoming like communist China’s or Soviet Russia’s (here’s an this excellent piece comparing the state of our current news media to the latter, again by journalist Matt Taibbi), but here’s the thing I don’t think people realize – the people in those countries didn’t just wake up one day to find their countries instantly transformed into a communist or socialist state. The transformation happened gradually, over many years.
Take a few days to read George Orwell’s 1984. The similarities between Orwell’s “fictional” totalitarian dystopia and the trajectory of our current society are numerous and frightening. Or spend some time reading anything the Wall Street Journal has published about a successful businessman and free-speech champion named Jimmy Lai, who published the most popular pro-democracy newspaper in Hong Kong and is now in Chinese prison because his paper dared to criticize the Chinese government. Just a year or so ago, Mr. Lai was operating his paper freely.
What’s odd about this moment in time is that we here in the U.S. have a media acting like it’s controlled by the government but – and for this I am thankful every day – we do still live in an era of unfettered free speech, where we can easily access other news sources that will tell us the truth, even if the corporate news sources refuse to do the same. The more the corporate news sources try to discredit those truth-tellers, the more people distrust the corporate news sources. It’s a silly game right now, and one that makes a LOT of people in the news industry look intensely foolish.
But the whole game moves quickly from foolish to dangerous if somehow our access to free speech and alternate news sources gets blocked. If, say, our national news outlets become beholden to the government … Or if Big Tech censors start controlling our local “news” sources and pushing “information” out to people incessantly via hip-hop music, or loudspeaker.
How long, then, before our society transforms into the oppressive and unforgiving place Orwell described in 1984, which “had been shaped and brought together by the barren world of monopoly industry and centralized government?”
wow. wow. wow. Amazing stuff you are doing Lisa!
Beyond excellent analysis...sharing